Lit Hub Daily: October 30, 2024
TODAY: In 1938, Orson Welles performs his adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds on the radio. Panic ensues.
Rebecca Solnit considers the reissue of Mike Davis’s Dead Cities and why “Mike knew apocalypses had been coming at us all along.” | Lit Hub Climate Change
“Is the language of his killers not part of our life? Is there a death we have not cheapened?” Fady Joudah on images from Gaza. | Lit Hub Politics
“Before the cottage, before the daisies in the grass, before / the narrow roads, before the fields cut into compartments / by the rocks and lichen, like a scalp divided phrenologically.” Read “Inis Meáin,” a poem by Gustav Parker Hibbett from the collection High Jump as Icarus Story. | Lit Hub Poetry
Geoffrey Wawro explains why the United States was doomed to fail in Vietnam: “What motivated the United States to go to war and stay there was a fear of appearing weak.” | Lit Hub History
“I’m pretty omnivorous when it comes to my reading habits.” Mike Fu’s TBR, featuring Ray Bradbury, Elysha Chang, Tony Tulathimutte, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
“Mave told me once I needed to write a book, and I said, ‘Beginning where?’” Read from Jessie van Eerden’s novel, Call it Horses. | Lit Hub Fiction
“The real battle is not between urban dwellers and smallholding farmers—as capitalist social conflict or cheap populism would render it…” On communes and the state of the Hudson Valley. | Public Books
Take a (snowy) look inside Orhan Pamuk’s notebooks. | The Paris Review
Lisa Ko: “To pressure authors to remain silent about institutional response to war in order to be eligible for prestigious literary prizes is not only ironic — PEN America’s mission, for instance, is to protect freedom of expression — but sinister.” | Truthout
Jamie Hood and Charlotte Shane discuss love, sex work, and writing: “The writing that I feel is most important can’t be monetized in any practical way, and, honestly, shouldn’t be.” | Bookforum
Could the key to our technological woes be…steampunk? Joshua Rothman considers. | The New Yorker
“Can Amazon reviews be more than just margin notes to Amazon’s particularly pernicious brand of monopoly capitalism?” Thomas Hobohm considers the universes within Kevin Killian’s Amazon reviews. | Dirt
